Healthcare related enterprises have grown rapidly through the acquisition of, and affiliation with, other organizational entities, creating a “multientity” health system. Tight operational integration of these entities has proved to be problematic, and affiliation is now the preferred model. In this way they have the benefit of enhanced leverage with external stakeholders (e.g., managed care organizations, suppliers) as well as the autonomy to deal with parochial issues. The result is an enterprise that is often organizationally, culturally, methodologically, geographically, and technologically diverse and fragmented. A challenge for this diverse, fragmented, multi-entity healthcare enterprise is to serve its customers through a seamlessly integrated continuum of services. A challenge for a software vendor is to provide software to support the multi-entity healthcare enterprise in delivering a seamlessly integrated continuum of services. The ability to deliver such seamless integration depends to a large degree on being able to share data between the constituent organizations of the multi-entity healthcare enterprise. This is impeded by the use of different terms, medical and other vocabularies and identifiers by the different constituent organizations.
The multi-entity healthcare enterprise is also required to employ many health-care workers to provide services to patients at a multiplicity of locations and involves a corresponding multiplicity of organizations (e.g. companies, payers, institutions, physician practices, clinics, hospitals, pharmacies etc.). Further, healthcare operations are structured into specialized departments such as nursing, laboratory, radiology, pharmacy, surgery, emergency, administrative and other departments which are variously located at one or more sites and may be associated with different organizations. The management of organization and location and related information involves accumulating, processing and maintaining large quantities of information. This information is employed in determining organizational relationships, including affiliations and characteristics as well as location availability and suitability for delivering services by a particular physician to a patient with particular medical conditions. The information also supports provision of clinical care, patient tracking, billing and administration and other purposes. Consequently, there is a need for a computerized system capable of defining and maintaining organization, location, service, physician, payer and insurance information as well as supporting sharing this information between different entities. It is also desirable that such a system supports sharing the maintained information between entities employing different terms, medical and other vocabularies and identifiers. A system according to invention principles addresses the identified deficiencies and derivative problems.